If you were lucky enough to see Rush play those dates in September 1980 – 16 scant shows – you’d have seen the trio showcase two brand-new songs too: Tom Sawyer and Limelight. It’ll give readers some idea of the hectic writing, recording and touring schedule that the band were all undergoing at that point in their career that it was straight after they’d finished writing for Moving Pictures that they packed up their equipment, rescued Lifeson’s plane from a tree and set out to play some shows before heading to Morin-Heights to begin making Moving Pictures. They are, at turns, reflective, forgetful, deeply focused or simply goofy when it comes to recalling the summer writing stints – and autumn and winter recording sessions – that led to them making a record that would help propel them to platinum rock star status, and go on to dominate their live set until the band finally retired in 2015.
Even on a Zoom call, the sparky energy that kept them as friends and bandmates for over 40 years is still self-evident. Lee is in his living room, Lifeson in his home studio, the wall behind him hung with guitars. It’s early 2022 and Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee are sat in their respective homes in Toronto, the town where they both met as gawky kids with ambitions of being in a band. Welcome to the writing sessions for an album that would help define not only Rush, but also rock music in the early 80s: Moving Pictures.
Lifeson: “As long as you weren’t being hit in the head, by, you know, Broon’s or They were fun writing sessions, a good headspace.” And when the thing took off, I had to hit the deck! This plane whizzing around overhead tethered to Broon – I mean, it had to come down eventually. Lee: “I was standing not too far from him. He was going around and around, and I was laughing so much that I had to lay down in the grass. Lee: “It was going around and around, getting faster and faster and Terry was holding on to it and getting dizzier and dizzier…” And the engine on it was probably 12,000 horsepower, and it went, like, 900 miles an hour. It was on these lines, and you flew it in circles, I guess. “But you should have seen the plane that Terry had. Might have been Broon’s truck? Bang, right into the top of the cab, put a hole in the roof,” he recalls. “I had a radio-controlled plane that I built there and crashed into the top of a truck.
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